A direction.
Maybe the real entrance has been here the whole time, hidden behind the mountain’s illusions.
For the first time since crossing onto this ridge, hope flares, and though small and fragile—flickering like a candle in a storm—it’salive.
I lift my hand slowly, hovering it inches from the rippling distortion. The air vibrates faintly around it, humming with something old and aware—as if the mountain itself is turning its gaze toward me.
Warning me?
Inviting me?
Judging me?
My pulse thunders in my ears. Every instinct screams to turn back. But there is no version of my future where I walk away now. Not after everything we’ve endured. Not with so much at stake. Not when the mountain has finally shown me where to go.
My fingertips brush the stone—
and the world tilts.
It isn’t stone at all.
It yields beneath my touch—pliant and cool—parting around my fingers the way water folds when you skim your hand just beneath its surface. Instinct yanks me backward, and the wall snaps shut again, rippling outward in soft concentric waves. The illusion trembles, like heat bending the air over a sun-baked road.
My breath catches mid-inhale.
The truth sits on my tongue before the words even form.
“This is it,” I whisper into the restless silence. “Oriah… you meant this.”
All this time I’d been looking upward—bleeding my strength into a climb designed to crush me—when the real path waited below my fear, below the surface, below the mountain itself. The deception was never the summit; it was the belief that the summit was the only way.
I raise my hand again, slower this time, and press my palm flat to the surface.
The illusion softens instantly.
There is no resistance—only the cool, fluid give of something waiting to be crossed. My skin slips through effortlessly. My wrist follows. Then my forearm. Each inch is swallowed by a cold so deep it gnaws at the bone, a winter older than the Peak’s themselves, preserved and patient in the hollowed heart of the mountain.
I grit my teeth and push forward, refusing to hesitate now that I’ve begun.
Behind me, the wind rises sharply, howling across the ridge like a wounded beast. Pebbles skitter along the narrow path. My hair lashes against my cheeks in frantic strands.
And then—I step forward fully.
The world swallows me whole.
Darkness folds over my shoulders, dense and absolute, and the stone seals shut behind me with a faint, shuddering sigh, like a curtain falling between one reality and the next.
The air inside is deathly still, icy with the weight of centuries. For a moment, I stand frozen, letting my eyes adjust to the faint glimmer pulsing in the distance.
A soft thud.
Then another.
Torches flicker on, unveiling a steep spiral staircase descending deep within the mountain’s chest.
The truth beneath.
The path no map could ever show.
